Various cabinets, racks, tables and shelving have been used for assembling, storing, and transporting medical instruments, tools, and implant devices throughout hospitals and surgery centers for medical operations and procedures. Typically surgical instruments, tools and implant devices are washed, sterilized, wrapped, and stored until required instrumentation is set up in the operating room prior to surgery or a medical procedure.
The numerous personnel including but not limited to patients, hospital administration, surgeons, nursing staff, scrub technicians, sterile processing employees, device manufacturers, manufacturers' representatives along with the vast number of tools and instruments required for a specific surgery creates a need for precise coordination. The number of incidents that occur because of miscommunication, lack of teamwork and the extensive level of variables can be hard to quantify and are rarely published, however the monetary cost can be estimated using an average operating cost per min. Incidents that occur in and around the operating room have been found to incur high monetary costs and correlate directly with increased infection rates and lengthened recovery times. The lack of procedure protocols prior to, during, and after surgery increases the risk of incidents and contributes to high health care costs.